“Well, I suppose it would be convenient for him if it turned out I had a mistress. That’s one of the good things about being down here. Behind the barriers. No private detectives in black Suburbans. You know what’s really strange? His first wife was actually named Sasha. My wife’s name.”
“You sure you’re not just being—”
“Paranoid?”
“I mean, there are a lot of black Suburbans in the city.”
“So everyone tells me. It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t have anything to hide, except maybe embarrassment. The mortification of the cuckold.”
“Russell had a thing with this girl. An investment banker. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure she worked for Bernie Melman. God, that whole time was so insane, I haven’t thought about it in years. The only way I can is to write the whole thing off as a kind of mass hysteria we got caught up in, Russell most of all. Imagine, he’s afraid he’s going to get fired, so he decides to buy out the company. And he probably would’ve pulled it off, if not for the crash. But when the financing fell through, he was pushed out of the deal that eventually emerged. And along the way, we separated. Then his best friend—our best friend, actually—died a few months later.”
This was a bare summation certainly, but she’d just met him, after all.
Coinciding with Jeff Pierce’s death, and the onslaught of the new epidemic that had killed him and the revelation of mutual infidelities, the crash of ’87 spelled the end of their collective innocence. Visiting Jeff in Silver Meadows, where he was in rehab, being treated, as he said, for “an excess of excess,” they somehow failed to notice that the tracks on his arms were being replaced by the lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Carried away by the epidemic. Did that qualify as self-inflicted?
And their own destinies? They’d participated in the binge and contributed to their own undoing—certainly Russell had. But this thing, this was as absurd a deus ex machina as a sneak attack from Mars. Wasn’t it? Surely they weren’t responsible for this.
“But you got back together,” Luke said. “In the end.”
She nodded. The market, and the city, had recovered, soaring to heights that made the bull run of the eighties seem quaint in comparison, and what of the lessons that were supposed to have been learned? Only the styles had changed, SUVs replacing stretch limos, platinum replacing gold, new money aping the unshowy habits of the old, as if the only lesson of it all was that the sins of the previous decade had been sins against taste; the belief seemed to prevail that if you didn’t flaunt it in a tacky way, the lightning bolt wouldn’t find you. But she refused to believe that anyone deserved to die for the collective hubris.
She knew that Russell had felt he’d been left behind, relatively impoverished and marginalized in the new boomtown. After a brief stint in Hollywood, he’d gotten another editing job, while she had gone to law school and then to the DA’s office, quitting when the kids came along, reducing their income as their expenses soared, stranding them like paupers in a city of zillionaires, and she knew Russell resented that. Would this new apocalypse strengthen them, or reveal the weakness of their foundations?
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Of what? Dying?”
“Not so much of dying. Of dying before I discover the point of my existence. Before I accomplish something.”
“Surely you’ve accomplished something.”
“I’ve facilitated the movement of capital around the globe like a bee mindlessly carrying pollen. Financial markets are autonomous. Markets, if they work correctly, supersede the will and whim of individuals. Which would seem to make me, my career of the past nineteen years, more or less irrelevant.”
“But markets don’t work perfectly; there are always information gaps and friction. Which is the whole point of the Street. Of people like you—like you used to be.”
“Well, I decided there had to be something more important that I could do. Now I’m certain of it—I can’t, after all this, imagine going into the firm every day. But I have no fucking idea what it might be. I’ve been thinking about Guillermo, wondering what he might have done if he’d known how little time he had left. What did he leave behind? A few friends and a beautiful loft.”
They were walking alongside the graveyard of Trinity Church, where, she seemed to remember, Alexander Hamilton was interred. She stopped and looked in at the blackened and tilting stones. “I just realized there aren’t really any graveyards in Manhattan. I mean, barely. This one and a few other old churchyards that have survived. It’s like the dead have been banished to the boroughs and New Jersey. You know Pre-Lachaise in Paris, that huge cemetery? Every weekend, the Parisians walk and picnic among their illustrious dead. We don’t have the space or the time for the dead.”
“We do now,” Luke said, nodding toward the smoke emanating from the new graveyard.
“So what do you do with your days when you’re not making peanut butter sandwiches?”
“I’m writing a book.”
“Really?”
“No, in fact, not really. It’s what I say, since Manhattan abhors idleness.”
“I know, I know,” she said, amazed somehow to hear this coming from a man.
“I haven’t really touched it since June. And I doubt I will.”
“What would it be about if you were writing it?”
“I think it would be about the samurai film. I have hundreds of pages of notes. It’s not as if I haven’t been circling it. But I can’t really claim to be writing. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not too late, at my age. In college, I thought I wanted to be a writer. I smoked Gauloises and lugged Ulysses and Being and Nothingness around the Williams campus. Investment banking—that was about getting my bearings, making some money before I started my real life. You know, make a few bucks and sail off to Europe or Burma. Like Hemingway, Graham Greene—”
“I can’t believe you said Greene. I love Greene,” she said. She’d been expecting to hear Faulkner or maybe Walker Percy. “I’ve actually been working on a screenplay of The Heart of the Matter.”
“Old what’s his name… Scobie. I loved that book.”
“It’s still good.”
“I just meant I haven’t read it in years.”
“You should.”
“So you’re a screenwriter?”
She laughed. “Hardly.”
“I thought that was the proper term for people who write screenplays.”
“Oh… I see what you mean. More of a mother who’s written two screenplays than a screenwriter. I just… it sounds very glamorous. I just can’t really think of myself as a screenwriter. I actually sold one, years ago. Story of an idealistic young woman corrupted by Wall Street. Well, almost corrupted by Wall Street. But then of course—not. Saved by her conscience in the third act. Universal bought it, but it never actually got produced. No, The Heart of the Matter is a labor of love.”
“You’re a Catholic?”
“Only by marriage. And you’re a southerner?”
“Only by birth.”
“I thought it was something like Catholicism—more or less indelible.”
“Don’t we all come to New York to invent ourselves from scratch?”
“We try. But I’m beginning to think our past always catches up with us in the end. Nobody’s sui generis.”
He looked at her skeptically. “Do you always talk like this?”
“Like what?” she asked, blushing. She knew what he meant; Russell used to call her on it in the old days.
“Like, I don’t know, a professor of logic.”
“I’ve been accused of it.”
“Tell me about those food issues,” he said as they approached the checkpoint.
“I haven’t talked about that in years.”
“Not even to your shrink?”
She’d been certain he was going to say husband—and was relieved that he hadn’t. “You see before you one of those rare New Yorkers who don’t
have a shrink. Which probably proves I’m not a New Yorker at all—still an old-fashioned New England WASP. Unless you count six months of marriage counseling.”
“Did it work?”
“I thought so at the time,” she said, realizing with a kind of thrill—the thrill of contemplating a dangerous stunt, a backflip from a high diving board while your parents aren’t looking—that she wasn’t sure, now, all these years later, if it had worked. Was her marriage working? Noting that she’d used the singular pronoun, wondering what the hell she was doing, though of course she knew what she was doing—she was just surprised that she was doing it.
“But we were talking about food,” she said, stepping back from the edge of the diving board.
“Okay.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just agreeing with you. It’s just a kind of verbal filler, a way of saying I’m listening.”
“Okay.”
“Exactly. So you were saying?”
“Well,” she began.
“If you’d rather not, I understand.”
“No, I want to,” she said. “So shut up and listen.” Somehow, this seemed more flirtatious than anything she’d said yet, but she pressed on. “I’ve always had these little hang-ups, I guess you’d call them. For the longest time when I was little, I’d eat only three things: bananas, link sausages, and Cream of Wheat. I literally couldn’t swallow anything else. When my parents tried to get me to, especially if it was meat that wasn’t a sausage, I’d just sit there chewing and chewing for hours, and if I tried to swallow, I’d gag. I guess I must have gotten over it eventually; I can’t remember when that period finally ended. And then I went to prep school.”
“Ah, yes,” he said.
“Why do you say ‘Ah, yes’?”
“Sorry.”
“I guess you’ve heard this story before. It is kind of generic, like the lesbian crush or the dashing older man. Anyway, to make a long story short, I became obsessed with my weight and eventually they sent me to a hospital where I had to learn how to eat again and get over my body-image problem.”
“And did you?”
“Mostly. But I still wonder, why do we have to be hungry, why do we have to eat all the time? Sometimes—over the years—I’ve had these little relapses. There are emotional triggers, blah, blah, blah—” She stopped in her tracks, smiling at him brightly, her vision blurred by tears. He hesitated, taking a step back toward her and reaching for her, lowering his arms as she leaned away from him.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s not… it’s not your fault.”
“Well. I’m—”
“I think that’s why I couldn’t have a baby.”
He didn’t say anything, for which she was grateful.
“I never really admitted that before,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“I thought you’d mentioned children yesterday.”
“Twins. My sister’s eggs. My husband’s, ahem, sperm. My womb. Very complicated.” She started to walk again.
“The one who was here yesterday? Hilary?”
“I know it’s probably irrational,” she said, “but sometimes I’m terrified that she’s going to want to claim them someday. That was the first thing I thought when she turned up on our doorstep. Right before… all this.”
“She didn’t really strike me as the maternal type.”
She was suddenly conscious of the din, the roar of diesels and the clanging percussion of steel on steel.
They stopped just in front of the barricade at Pine Street, by the Equitable Building, beyond the chain-link fence that had been thrown up recently. Three huge banks of lights hovered above the invisible carnage, illuminating the shifting clouds of gray smoke that sifted into the sky. From within the murk, the grapplers rising above the ruins, dipping and disappearing again, unleashing further spumes of smoke. They stood silently, looking through the mesh of the fence for what might have been several minutes, or longer.
“You said you had a daughter?” she finally asked, after they started to retrace their steps.
“Thirteen. No, fourteen. I keep forgetting. Wishful thinking, I suppose. One of the things I looked forward to about not working was spending time with her. But she won’t let me in. I wish I could just take her away. Get her out of here. But I’m afraid it’s too late.”
“She’s only fourteen.”
He looked out into the smoke beyond the barricade. “Fourteen in New York is like twenty-seven in normal human years.”
“God, I hope not.”
“And where would I take her, anyway? She’d be getting the same message from the culture in Tennessee or Alaska—live to spend, dress to kill, shop and fuck your way to happiness—it’s just transmitted more rapidly here.”
As jumbled as this was, she thought she knew exactly what he meant. Jeremy asking about Ferraris and Porsches popped into her head.
“The truth is, I dread going home in the mornings,” he said. “I start to panic whenever I think about going back uptown. I feel like as long as I stay here, nothing else will happen. To the city. To me. I’m afraid of what comes next.”
The sky to the east was salmon-colored above the anonymous office towers of lower Broadway. Corrine was reminded of those riotous nights when the dawn had caught them unawares—unwelcome as a visit from the police, signaling the end of the revelry. She felt her own sense of dread and melancholy, emerging from the long nocturnal suspension of belief. Remembering, dimly, that the night was never long enough when you were falling in love.
17
How were you supposed to trust your judgment when your sense of proportion and balance had been shattered, when the governing body that generally checked your emotions was overthrown, anarchy threatening to break out at any moment? At a time when you might find yourself breaking into tears with no ostensible cause, what did it mean that the sight of a certain face could lift you up and make you believe that what was left was worth saving? Or else that it could all go to hell, all of it except for you and her.
Did he feel this way because of what was happening around him, or in spite of it?
It wasn’t as if he could compare the course of his feelings to a hypothetical narrative in which planes hadn’t crashed and towers hadn’t fallen, in which they weren’t both, like the rest of the population, in a state of shock. In that narrative, they never would have met, something that was now, for Luke, almost unimaginable and certainly undesirable. His sleep was ravaged by images of carnage, but his daydreams featured the two of them as the last survivors, walking cinematically out of the smoke and rubble of an even more comprehensive cataclysm. This had been a recurring fantasy of youth—the only scenario in which he could imagine the girls he desired having anything to do with him: a disaster that wiped out the entire population, except for two, he and his beloved, tiny figures walking away from the ruins of Babylon into a vast, blighted landscape.
Luke began to wonder if whatever good he was doing downtown was morally canceled out by the pleasure he derived from being there.
Once again they were awaiting, and trying to postpone, the coming day, sitting on a bench in Battery Park and watching the sun rise over Brooklyn, lingering as the rosy penumbra diffused into a steely October sky. The smoke was still thick around them, but they were seldom aware of it. It had become the air they breathed.
“Do you think she’s still having an affair?”
“At this point, I really don’t know.”
“Being here every night—don’t you think you’re giving her an awfully long leash?”
“I think enough rope is the operative clich.”
“Lately, I’ve been wondering if Russell hasn’t been having an affair.”
“What makes you think that?” He tried not to betray undue interest in this possibility, even as his pulse quickened.
“I don’t have any evidence, if that’s what you mean. It’s just a feeling.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to work the day shift, when he’s at the office?”
“That’s what Russell was asking this morning.”
“What did you say?”
“Just that I like it better at night. The kids are sleeping, so I don’t miss them. And that this is where I need to be. I didn’t say this, but I suppose I don’t feel very close to him right now.” She suddenly turned to face him. “Why? Are you implying something?”
“What might I be implying?”
“I don’t know—that it has something to do with you?”
He shook his head vigorously.
“Well, actually, goddamn it, I suppose it does. That’s the bitch of it. I think it probably does have to do with you.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
He leaned across the bench and kissed her. He was surprised how easy it was, and how much he liked the way she tasted, her mouth a kind of living, briny delicacy with an earthy note, a taste almost of truffles, hinting of further and deeper pleasures, which were also suggested by the slow caress of her tongue when she hesitantly brought it into play, although he felt that he could be happy with just this, exploring the variations of this kiss for a very long time. He had forgotten, if he ever knew it, that a kiss could be so absorbing and satisfying in its own right, something to be savored… an end in itself rather than a stop along the way to one’s ultimate destination… even as he felt the increasing pressure of a nascent erection.
He hadn’t been certain whether he would make the transition from liking her and admiring her—liking the way she looked and laughed, finding her quirky and sensible at the same time—to wanting her. Somehow, he hadn’t expected, if it came right down to it, to respond to her viscerally. He’d imagined that many of the qualities that drew him toward her—intelligence, a sense of humor, shared values—would prevent him from seeing her as an object of sexual desire. For all of Sasha’s high polish, she projected a voracious, exhibitionistic sexuality, which clearly distinguished her from the nice girls in the room. No one had ever said of Sasha that she was nice. Ultimately, you knew she wasn’t, and this made her dangerously attractive. One of those women who needed to communicate their desirability, a hypothetical availability—at least until recently he had imagined it to be hypothetical—to every man they encountered, she had the heart, and the manner, of a courtesan. Her more attractive dinner partners inevitably left the table dreaming of the myriad ways that Sasha could make them happy if only she weren’t married, if only a tenuous and reluctant grip on propriety didn’t restrain her. It was almost pathological, her need to provoke desire, although Luke had to admit it worked on him as well as on the others—that it had helped keep him in the marriage all these years. He had stopped respecting her, but he still wanted her. Once he had finally admitted this to himself, it had become even easier to want her, simply to lust for her, and act on it, to think of her as a geisha to whom he happened to have proprietary rights.
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